Terms of Service

01Who we are

ChessDial is built and run by ChessBase India. The company you contract with is:

Legal name

ChessBase India 64 Squares Private Limited

CIN

U93000MH2016PTC272155

GSTIN

27AAGCC3169H1ZK

Registered address

301, Damji Shamji Trade CentreKirol Road, Vidyavihar (West)Mumbai 400086, Maharashtra, India

Customer support

support@chessbase.in

“We”, “us” and “ChessDial” mean that company. “You” means whoever is using the site - as a student, as a coach, or as an academy.

02What ChessDial is

ChessDial is a marketplace. Coaches and academies list themselves, students find them and pay to open a chat with them on ChessDial, and the teaching itself happens between the two of you - online or in person.

We are not the coach. Coaches and academies on ChessDial are independent. They are not our employees, agents or partners, and we do not set their syllabus, their ongoing rates, their timings or their methods. The session itself is an arrangement between you and them.

What we do is narrower, and we would rather be precise about it than sound reassuring:

• Every listing is read by a person before it goes live, and again after an edit. We check that a profile is coherent and plausible - not that every claim on it is true.
• A blue tick means a name matched a government ID. Where a coach or academy sends us an identity document, we check the name on it against the name on the profile. That is an identity check, not a background check, a character reference, or a judgement on how well they teach.
• Ratings come from students who actually booked. A review can only be left by someone whose booking went through ChessDial.
• Achievements, titles, experience and student counts are self-declared unless a profile says otherwise. FIDE ratings and titles, where shown, are read from FIDE’s own published data.

We do not supervise sessions, and we cannot guarantee that any coach will suit you, turn up, or be any good. What we do guarantee is set out in section 8: if a coach you paid to message never replies, or never shows up, you get the session fee back.

Who sells you the session

The coach or academy sells you the demo session. ChessDial is the marketplace it is sold through. In Indian law we are an e-commerce operator: we list the session, take your payment on the coach’s or academy’s behalf, hold it until your window to report a problem has closed, and pass it on. Separately, we charge you our own convenience fee for the booking.

Checkout names who you are buying from and the city and state they work from, and the invoice for the session is issued in their name. If you need to take a complaint up with them directly, ask us and we will give you their legal name and address.

03Your account

You sign in with Google. We do not issue passwords, so keeping your Google account secure is what keeps your ChessDial account secure.

• To book as a student you must be 18 or over. Chess coaching is often for children, and that is expected - but the account, the payment and the contact details must belong to a parent or guardian, who books on the child’s behalf and is responsible for the arrangements they make.
• A coach or academy owner aged 14 to 17 can list, but only with a parent or legal guardian who takes responsibility for the account. Nobody under 14 can list. Section 4 sets out how that works.
• The details you give us - your name, email, phone number, FIDE details and message - are passed to the coach or academy you book so they can reach you, and you can also talk through ChessDial chat. Give us details that work; a coach who cannot reach you is not a coach who failed to deliver.
• One account per person. Your account is yours to use, not to share, sell or transfer.

If a parent or guardian arranges sessions for a child, they remain responsible for supervising those sessions and for deciding what contact with a coach is appropriate. We are not in the room, online or otherwise.

04Listing as a coach or academy

Anyone can apply to list. Nothing appears on the site automatically. When you submit a profile it goes into a review queue, a person reads it, and only then does it become visible to students. Editing a live profile sends the changes back through the same queue - the old version stays up until the new one is approved.

What you are promising us

• Everything on your profile is true and about you: your name, your location, your fees, your experience, your titles and your achievements. Do not list someone else, and do not list a coach who has not agreed to be listed.
• You are legally allowed to teach and to accept payment in the place you are listed in, and to hold whatever registrations or clearances that requires. We do not verify this.
• You own - or have permission to use - every photo you upload, including photos of students.
• If you take bookings, you will make a genuine effort to arrange the session, and to arrange it within 7 days of being paid.
• Your tax details are right and kept up to date: your legal name, your address, and your GSTIN if you are registered for GST. We print them on the invoices we issue in your name. If you tell us you are not registered, you are confirming that you do not need to be, and you will tell us as soon as that changes.

Your price

You set the price of your demo session, anywhere from ₹99 or $1.99 up to ₹9,999 or $124.99. It is the whole of what a student pays: 90% of it is your session fee and the rest is our convenience fee. If you are registered for GST, your session fee includes your GST. Coaches and academies in India set a rupee price and a US dollar price for students abroad; we suggest a dollar price, and you can change it.

Coaches and academy owners under 18

Everyone who lists gives us their date of birth. It is never shown on a profile and cannot be changed once saved. You must be at least 14 to list. If the date of birth you give makes you under 14, any profile you have is unlisted straight away and stays hidden from students until you turn 14.

If you are 14 to 17, an adult has to continue your application: hand it to your parent or legal guardian, who fills it in on your behalf.

• Your parent or guardian accepts these terms, not you. They are the responsible party for everything done on the account - every listing, booking, message and payout - and they sign off on all of it.
• Contact happens under adult supervision only. Students can reach you only through ChessDial Messages - your phone number and email are never shared - and your parent or guardian agrees to supervise every conversation with a student.
• The identity document is theirs, never yours. We check that the name on it matches your parent or guardian’s name. We never ask for an under-18’s own ID.
• Earnings are paid into their account, in their name, against their PAN or taxpayer identification number.
• When you turn 18, the account becomes yours. We will ask you to accept these terms yourself, verify with your own ID and move payouts to your own account.

Our team is told when an under-14 tries to list, whenever something is outstanding on an under-18’s account, and when an under-18 turns 18, so it can be followed up. A listing that does not meet these rules can be paused or removed under section 13.

Identity verification

You can send us a government identity document - Aadhaar, PAN, a passport or similar. We use it for one thing: checking that the name on it matches the name on your profile - or, if you are under 18, your parent or guardian’s name. Profiles that pass carry a blue tick. Documents are stored in a private bucket, are never shown to students, and are described in full in our Privacy Policy.

Your location on the map

If you drop a pin, we do not publish it. The point students see is your real pin moved by a fixed, secret distance of up to about a hundred metres, drawn inside a circle roughly the size of a city block. A student can tell which neighbourhood you work from; they cannot read your address off the map. Your real pin is visible only to you and to our reviewers.

Taking yourself off the site

You can unlist your profile at any time from your dashboard. Unlisting stops new bookings; it does not cancel a booking already paid for, and it does not end an obligation to a student who has already paid to message you.

05Booking a demo session

A booking on ChessDial buys you one thing, immediately: a chat with the coach or academy on ChessDial, plus their commitment to arrange a demo session with you. There is no calendar to book into. You message each other and agree a time.

What a booking gives you, exactly:

• Your details to them, and a chat. The coach or academy gets your name, email and phone number so they can reach you. Their own phone number and email are not shared with you; you talk to them on ChessDial, and either of you can start the conversation.
• For an academy, one centre. An in-person academy booking names one of that academy’s centres, so the academy knows where you want the session.
• A chat that stays open until you close it. Once the session is marked complete, either of you can close the chat. It stays closed until you book that coach or academy again. It also ends if the booking is reversed or one of you blocks the other.
• The right to review. Having booked is what lets you rate that coach or academy later.

Code of conduct

The coach or academy you message is a working professional, and you accept this code of conduct at checkout before you pay. It covers every message you send them.

• Chess, and nothing else. Every message stays on your game and how to improve it.
• No personal questions. Nothing about your coach’s private life, family, money or whereabouts.
• Be polite. Your coach is a professional. Speak to them like one.
• Do not message again and again. Send one message and leave it there. A flood of messages is harassment, not follow-up.
• Give them 7 days. Drop a message and wait - your coach has a 7-day window to come back to you. If you have heard nothing by then, report a problem instead of messaging again.

Chatting on ChessDial

Chat is the only way students and coaches or academies talk on ChessDial. These rules apply to everyone in it, on both sides, and we ask you to accept them before you send your first message.

• Keep personal details private. Do not ask for or send phone numbers, home addresses, ID, bank or card details. Nobody from ChessDial will ever ask you for these in chat.
• Contact details get a warning first. If a message looks like it holds a phone number or email address, we hold it and warn you that it can be misused. You can still choose to send it, and if you do, that is your decision and your risk.
• Links arrive with a warning. We deliver links, but show them with a warning that they may be harmful. Do not open a link or send money to anyone you do not trust.
• Block and report. Either side can block the other, which stops the conversation for both, or report a message or a person to us.
• Closing after the session. Once a session is marked complete, either side can close the conversation. Neither of you can send messages in it until the student makes a new booking, and you can both still read what was sent. Closing is not a report.
• We may read a conversation. Our team reads a conversation only when one of you reports it or a problem is open on the booking. Messages are also checked automatically for abuse, as the Privacy Policy explains.

Breaking these rules, or the code of conduct above, can cost you chat access or your account under section 13. Serious cases are reported to cyber crime.

Who teaches the session

When you book an academy you can say which trainer you would prefer, and the academy will see it. It is a preference, not a reservation. The academy assigns a trainer at its own discretion, based on your level and who is free. Being assigned a different trainer than you asked for is not grounds for a refund, and you agree to this at checkout before paying.

What is not included

The fee covers the introduction and the demo session. Anything after that - a course of lessons, a monthly retainer, tournament travel - is a private arrangement between you and the coach, at their rates, on their terms. We are not a party to it, we do not collect money for it, and we cannot help if it goes wrong.

Booking your own listing

You cannot book yourself, and you cannot use bookings, reviews or the activity feed to inflate your own profile. See section 12.

06Fees, payment and invoices

The coach or academy sets the price of a demo session. The price on their profile is the total you pay - nothing is added at checkout, and the split below appears on the checkout page and on your receipt.

Session fee

90% of the price. This is the coach’s or academy’s share, and it is the refundable part.

Convenience fee

10% of the price. This is ChessDial’s own charge to you for the booking - the listing, opening the chat, and holding your payment until the session is done. It is non-refundable, and it already includes our GST, which we pay ourselves.

GST

Never added on top. A coach or academy registered for GST includes their GST in the session fee, and their tax invoice shows how much of it that is. One that is not registered charges none. Our convenience fee includes our own GST.

Payment gateway charges

Borne by us, out of the convenience fee. They are never added to your total.

Currency

A listing in India is priced in Indian rupees and paid through Razorpay, unless you are booking from abroad, in which case it is US dollars through Stripe. A listing outside India is priced in US dollars through Stripe for everyone.

The total shown at checkout is the whole of what you pay. Nothing is added afterwards, and we do not store your card or bank details - the gateway handles the payment and we only ever see a reference to it.

Every listing is paid: a student books a demo session to message a coach or academy, wherever in the world they are. What differs is only the currency and the rail the money travels on - see payouts.

We can change the price limits at any time. A change never re-prices a booking you have already paid for - each booking keeps the figures it was made with.

Your receipt and invoices

Every booking comes with two PDFs, emailed to you once the payment clears and kept on your bookings page.

• A receipt from ChessDial for the whole payment: what you paid, how you paid it, and where it went.
• The invoices for what you bought. One is for the session, issued through ChessDial in the name of the coach or academy you booked: a tax invoice carrying their GSTIN and the GST in the price if they are registered for GST, and an invoice without GST if they are not. The other is ChessDial’s own tax invoice for the convenience fee.
• Credit notes if the booking is refunded, against each invoice, for the amount that comes back on it. A refund returns the session fee first, so one that keeps the convenience fee has a credit note for the session alone.

They are made out to your name and the state you chose at checkout. Add a billing address on your bookings page and they carry that too.

Booking for a business

If you are booking for a business registered for GST in India, choose Need a GST invoice? at checkout and add its GSTIN. We check that the number is well formed, and you confirm the business name and address against the GST portal before we use them. A GSTIN can be on only one ChessDial account, and you are responsible for it being your business’s own.

The invoices are then made out to that business, in the state its GSTIN is registered in. Our tax invoice for the convenience fee always carries your GSTIN, so you can claim input tax credit on its GST. For the session, only a coach or academy registered for GST can issue a tax invoice you can claim input tax credit on; from one that is not, you get an invoice without GST in your business’s name. Check the GSTIN before you pay - once a document is issued, we can correct it only as far as GST law allows.

Where the session is supplied, for GST

In the state of your business’s GSTIN, if you gave one. Otherwise, for an in-person session at an academy’s centre, in the state of that centre. Otherwise, if you are outside India, it is an export. Otherwise, in the state you chose at checkout. Our convenience fee follows the same order, without the centre: the state of your business’s GSTIN, then an export if you are outside India, then the state you chose. This decides which kind of GST applies - CGST and SGST, IGST, or none on an export - and never what you pay.

07Payouts to coaches and academies

What that means in practice:

• Money clears 7 days after the session is marked complete - the day the student’s window for reporting that it never happened shuts. You start that clock yourself by marking the session complete on your dashboard. If nobody marks it, we mark it 14 days after payment, so the clock always starts and a booking can never sit unpaid for ever.
• Rescheduling starts the clock again. If you put a new session date on a booking you had already marked complete, that booking goes back to being an upcoming session: the student’s old window is thrown away and a fresh one runs from the new session. That is the honest trade - the student keeps their protection, and you are paid 7 days after the session you actually taught rather than the one you did not.
• An open dispute holds the booking until the dispute is decided - decided against you, it is refunded to the student and never paid out; decided in your favour, it goes back on the payout track and is picked up by the next run.
• We need somewhere to send the money. In India, your PAN and either a bank account with IFSC or a UPI ID. Outside India, your taxpayer identification number and the email address on your PayPal account. If we do not have them when the run is built on the 8th, those earnings are held back and roll into the next run - held, not lost. If you are under 18, these are your parent or guardian’s details, not yours.
• Payouts outside India start at $10. Below that your earnings stay with us and roll into the next run rather than being sent - a transfer that small costs more in fees than it carries.
• A run that cannot go out rolls over. Whatever is held back for any of the reasons above stays yours and is added to the next month’s run.

Coaches and academies in India are paid in Indian rupees. Everywhere else we pay in US dollars through PayPal, and the listing is priced in US dollars too. Money does get converted on its way from the student’s card to your PayPal account, more than once.

If you are in India and a student outside India books you, that booking is priced and charged in US dollars and paid out to you in rupees. We convert it at the rate our payment processor actually gave us on that payment rather than one we choose, and fall back to our own reference rate only when the processor has not reported one yet. Until the run is built, the rupee figure on your earnings page is an estimate at today’s rate.

Tax on what you earn

What you earn through ChessDial is your income, and declaring it is your responsibility - we do not file on your behalf. Because we are the e-commerce operator your sales go through, Indian law asks us to do the following on what we pay you in India:

Income tax (TDS)

0.1% of your sales through ChessDial, before GST, deducted under section 393 of the Income-tax Act, 2025 (section 194-O of the old Act). If you are an individual or a Hindu undivided family, it starts only once those sales cross ₹5 lakh in a financial year, counted across every listing paid to the same PAN and including bookings before 1 November 2026. The payout that crosses it carries the deduction on the whole year so far. For anyone else it applies from the first rupee. If a PAN is missing or inoperative, the law sets 5%.

GST collected (TCS)

Only if you are registered for GST: 0.5% of the value of your sales before GST, net of refunds, collected under section 52 of the CGST Act, 2017. It shows in your GST portal, and you set it off against the GST you owe.

Your own GST

If you are registered, your share of the price includes your GST. We issue tax invoices in your name, but paying that GST and filing your returns are yours to do. If you are not registered, we issue invoices in your name and no GST is charged.

Our convenience fee

Charged by us to the student, invoiced to them, and our GST to pay. It is not a charge to you, so there is no invoice for it in your name, and it is not part of your sales for TDS or TCS.

Neither TDS nor TCS is a fee we keep. Both are paid to the government against your own PAN or GSTIN, both appear in your own tax records, and you set them off against what you owe or reclaim them when you file. Your payout arrives net of them, your earnings page shows each one, and we will give you the certificate or statement for them wherever one is due.

Outside India we are obliged to withhold on what we remit, and the documents that establish where you are resident for tax are what let us apply the lower rate your country’s treaty with India allows - without them we must withhold at the higher default rate, so we will ask for them before the run is built rather than after.

If you are owed money and want to know where it is, write to support@chessbase.in and we will tell you plainly.

08Problems and refunds

If you paid to message a coach and the session never happened, you can report it from your bookings page and get the session fee back. You have 7 days from the day the session is marked complete, and we email you on that day with the closing date in it. You do not have to wait for that email to act: if you have heard nothing at all, you can report a problem from 7 days after you pay, by which point the session was due to have happened. And if the coach reschedules a session they had marked complete, your window starts over from the new one.

The grounds, the amounts and the timings are set out in full in the Refund Policy, which forms part of these terms. In short: non-delivery is refundable, disappointment is not. A coach who turned up and was mediocre gets a two-star review, not a reversal.

We decide disputes ourselves, on one question - did the session happen? - and we tell both sides. To decide it we may read the booking’s chat. A coach who does not respond loses by default. Our decision is final as far as the platform is concerned; it does not take away any right you have under Indian consumer law.

09Reviews and ratings

Only a student who has opened a chat with them through ChessDial can review a coach or academy, and only once per profile. Reviews are public: yours appears on that coach’s or academy’s profile with your name and profile photo, where anyone - the coach included - can see it.

Write about the coaching. Do not use a review to:

• post a phone number, an address or anyone’s personal details;
• abuse, threaten or defame someone;
• settle a score unrelated to the session, or repeat something you have not experienced yourself.

We do not edit reviews to make a coach look better, and we do not remove one for being unflattering. We will remove a review that breaks the rules above, and we may remove ratings we believe were bought, traded or posted by the coach.

Some profiles also show reliability figures - how often that coach actually scheduled, and how often a dispute against them was upheld - calculated over the last 90 days and only once there are enough bookings for the number to mean anything.

10Notable students

Coaches and academies can list students they have taught. A claim stays marked unverified until the student themselves confirms it, through a single-use link we send them.

• Only list a student you actually taught, and describe your part in their chess honestly.
• For a student under 18, the confirmation comes from a parent or guardian, and the contact details we hold are the guardian’s. We hold no contact details for an under-18 student.
• A student can ask us to take their name off your profile, and we will.

Ratings shown next to a student come from FIDE’s published data, never from what a coach typed.

11Your content

Your profile, photos, bio, achievements, reviews and messages stay yours. By putting them on ChessDial you give us permission to store them, show them to other users, and use them to promote ChessDial and the coaches on it - no more than that, and only for as long as you keep them on the site.

You are responsible for what you upload. If you do not hold the rights to a photo, do not upload it.

12What is not allowed

Using ChessDial to do any of this will cost you your account:

• Faking bookings or reviews. Booking your own listing, arranging bookings with friends to lift your stats, or paying for reviews.
• Routing around the convenience fee. Publishing your contact details in a place designed to be read for free - your bio, a photo, an achievement title, a review - so students can reach you without booking, or asking a student to pay you off the platform for the demo session.
• Harvesting. Scraping profiles, automating chat unlocks, working around the anti-bot check, or collecting students’ or coaches’ details to use or sell elsewhere.
• Impersonation. Listing yourself as someone you are not, claiming a title or a FIDE ID that is not yours, or uploading someone else’s identity document.
• Harassment or harm. Abusing, threatening, discriminating against or endangering anyone you meet through the site - a student, a coach, or our staff. Anything involving a child that crosses that line will be reported to the authorities, not just moderated.
• Attacking the site. Probing it for vulnerabilities, overwhelming it with traffic, or trying to reach data that is not yours.

Found a security problem? Tell us at support@chessbase.in before telling anyone else. We would much rather hear it from you.

13Suspension and removal

We can unlist a profile, refuse a listing, reverse a payout, or close an account where we reasonably believe these terms have been broken - or where a listing is putting students at risk. Where we can give notice first, we will. Where a student is at risk, we will act first and explain afterwards.

Closing your account does not wipe out what you already owe, and does not cancel a refund already due to a student.

You can stop using ChessDial whenever you like. Unlist from your dashboard, or write to us and we will close the account and delete what we are not required to keep - see how long we keep things.

14Our responsibility, and its limits

We take responsibility for running ChessDial properly: reviewing listings, holding money for the dispute window, deciding disputes fairly, and refunding what the Refund Policy says we will refund.

We are not responsible for the teaching. We do not promise that a coach will suit your child, that a session will improve anyone’s rating, or that a coach will behave well. Those are between you and them.

Where the law allows us to limit what we owe you, our total liability for anything arising out of a booking is limited to what you paid us for it. That limit does not apply to anything that cannot be limited by law - including our own fraud or gross negligence - and nothing here reduces your rights under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019.

ChessDial is provided as it is. We keep it running as well as we can, but we do not promise it will never be down, never lose a search, or never show a stale figure.

15Changes to these terms

We will change this page as the product changes. The date at the top always says when. For the booking terms specifically - the ones you tick at checkout - we keep a version number, currently 2026-11-v7, and record against each booking which version was accepted. A booking is always governed by the version in force when it was paid for.

If a change materially affects money already in the system, we will say so directly rather than leave it to a diff on this page.

16Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of India. Courts in Mumbai, Maharashtra have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising out of them - the same jurisdiction as the rest of ChessBase India.

If a clause here turns out to be unenforceable, the rest stands. If we do not enforce something immediately, that is not us giving it up.

17Grievances and support

Two ways to reach us, and both land with a person:

• Email support@chessbase.in - put your booking reference in it if you have one.
• Use the Feedback button, which sits in the bottom corner of every page on this site. Tell us how to reach you and we will get in touch.

For a grievance under the Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules, 2020, write to our grievance officer:

Grievance officer

Harsh Kumar, Engineer, ChessBase India

Email

support@chessbase.in

Post

Grievance Officer, ChessBase India 64 Squares Private Limited301, Damji Shamji Trade CentreKirol Road, Vidyavihar (West)Mumbai 400086, Maharashtra, India

Response time

Acknowledged within 48 hours, resolved within a month.